Curriculum

Check Your Sources The Skill: Evaluating information found in your sources on the basis of accuracy, validity, appropriateness for needs, importance, and social and cultural context The Challenge: While most kids know not to believe everything they read online, the majority also don’t take the time to fully evaluate their sources, according to the John D. and Catherine T.

MacArthur Foundation. The same study showed that, on average, kids as young as 11 rate themselves as quite proficient Internet users, which may inflate their confidence. The Solution: As a class, discuss the benchmarks for evaluating a website: currency (Is the information up to date?) 2. The Skills: Developing and refining search queries to get better research results The Challenge: Students will enter a search term, say, “Abraham Lincoln,” and comb through pages of results that aren’t related to their research (think Lincoln beards, Lincoln Logs), rather than narrowing their original query (“Lincoln assassination”).
ReadWorks Offers a Nice Set of Poems and Guiding Questions for Poetry Month. ReadWorks is one of my favorite nonprofit services for teachers.

ReadWorks offers hundreds of lesson plans and thousands of non-fiction and fiction passages aligned to Common Core standards. Additionally, each article is listed with a Lexile score and suggested grade level. ReadWorks recently released a new set of poems and guided reading questions. The collection has poems appropriate for students in middle school and high school. Each poem in the collection comes with a set of questions that you can give to students to answer individually or simply use as a group discussion guide.

Applications for Education One of the aspects of ReadWorks that I like is that lexile scores are listed for each article. With a free ReadWorks account you can search for lessons and reading passages by grade level, lexile score, reading skill, subject area, and text type (fiction or non-fiction).
What’s Changed in Harper Lee’s Hometown Since ‘Mockingbird’
A local theater production of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” performed for schoolchildren in the Monroe County Heritage Museum in Monroeville, Ala., in 2015.

Sharon Steinmann / AP “Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it.” That’s how Scout Finch describes the steadfastly Southern setting of Harper Lee’s beloved novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Maycomb is a fictional city, but it’s based on Lee’s birthplace and childhood home of Monroeville, in Monroe County, Alabama, where Lee died on Friday. Monroe County was the perfect model for the setting of the Depression-era novel. Eighty-four years later, Monroe County has become smaller, whiter and richer, but the racial disparities Lee illustrated in her book still exist.

Overall, Monroe County is still poor, with a 29.2 percent poverty rate and a 41.2 percent child poverty rate, both well above the rate for the U.S. overall. The racial income gap appears to have narrowed but remains wide.
Teacher Professional Development is Broken, 3 Steps to Fix It. Many teachers feel like teacher professional development is a waste.

Dan Brown shares the three research-based ways to make teacher PD better.
3 Simple Steps to Help Students Become a Global Citizen. Like squirrels in a sack, we can choose to coexist or we can make life miserable for one another.

We are all a global citizen whether we realize it or not. Parents and teachers are building the bridges today that tomorrow will walk across. Let’s be clear about something. Because of the way students form their opinions, if you’re not building a bridge, you’re building a wall. There is no middle ground here. Have a Big Mind. Standards. Standards Welcome to the Michigan Academic Standards Page!

According to the dictionary, a standard is “something considered by an authority or by general consent as a basis of comparison”. Today’s world is replete with standards documents such as standards of care, standards of quality, and even standard operating procedures. These various sets of standards serve to outline agreed-upon expectations, rules, or actions which guide practice and provide a platform for evaluating or comparing these practices. The state academic standards posted here serve to outline learning expectations for Michigan’s students and are intended to guide local curriculum development.

Modern Professional Learning: Connecting PLCs With PLNs. Great teaching knowledge dies every day.

It retires. It leaves. Perhaps the secret of saving this knowledge lies in a unique melding of two professional learning practices that teachers use today: the professional learning community (PLC) and the professional learning network (PLN). Someone must pass along the knowledge. Someone must "build the craft.

" The same is true today. The Professional Learning Community The PLC has long been a mainstay of excellent schools. The reason professional learning communities increase student learning is that they produce more good teaching by more teachers more of the time. Typically a Professional Learning Community is "a group of educators that meets regularly, shares expertise, and works collaboratively to improve teaching skills and the academic performance of students.
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